Secret history: murder in a trailer

Justin St Germain was 20 when his mother was shot dead by her husband in a trailer in Arizona. He spent the next decade refusing to be defined by his 'trailer trash' past. But his lie began to destroy him

Justin St Germain: 'I expect the people I care about to die, and I don’t make plans for
the future, because I don’t believe in it.' Photograph: Steve Craft for the Guardian
Steve Craft/Guardian

I was riding my bike home from class when a plane roared overhead, a green A-10 flying so low I could read its markings. I took my eyes off the road to watch it cross the sky. I'd been living in Tucson for a year, and hardly noticed the planes any more as they flew to and from the air force base. But it had been nine days since the towers fell and we were all newly conscious of planes. I was 20 years old. I knew the world had changed, but I didn't know how much.

I rode my bike recklessly, hopping kerbs and cutting across yards on my way to the rented house I shared with my brother, sweating through my shirt in the liquid heat. When I remember that bike ride, it's always beautiful: a bright, expansive sky, tyres whizzing on the road. A mile, a few minutes of my life, but in my memory it lasts for ever, and I remain that young man riding his bike, never reaching that front porch. That moment is golden, it's gone, it's a myth, but I remember it.

When I reached our driveway, I got off my bike to check the mail. The screen door flew open and my brother emerged, red-faced and weeping, phone in hand, struggling to speak. I had never seen him anything like that before, so I knew what he was going to say. He let the screen door slam behind him. I dropped my bike in the yard. He bent at the waist and pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand, still holding the phone in the other. I hoped he'd never find his voice. "She's dead."

"Who?" I had the sense of being watched, as if I would be expected to ask.

"Mum," he said. "Mum's dead." He turned and walked inside.

I climbed the porch steps, and stood on the threshold. Josh walked around our living room. He told the person on the phone that he had to go and hung up.

"Who was that?"

"Connie." She and her husband, Bob, were our mother's best friends. "She was supposed to meet them for lunch and didn't. Bob went to the property and found her."

"What do you mean, found her?" The heat pressed against my back. I couldn't go inside until I made sense of this feeling: not shock, not grief – those would come later – but recognition, as if I had always known this moment would come.

"She got shot."

Soon after we learned that our mother was dead, my brother and I went to a bar. Josh had called our grandparents, who lived in Philadelphia. Grandpop said he'd book the first flight he could, but air travel was snarled from the attacks nine days earlier. I called my dad in New Hampshire. I told him she was dead and a long pause ensued, one in a litany of silences between my father and me, stretching across the years since he'd left and the distance between us. Finally he said she was a good person, that he'd always cared for her. He asked if I wanted him to fly to Arizona. I said he didn't have to and hung up.

"What now?" I asked.

Josh kept his eyes on the menu and shook his head. "There's not much we can do."

"Should we go out there?"

"We can't. The property is a crime scene."

I asked if we should talk to the cops and he said he already had, that we were meeting with Detective Freeney on Monday. I asked about a funeral and he said the coroner had to do an autopsy first. There was a long pause. My mother and her parents always said Josh was more like my father, difficult to read. I got more from my mother, they said, the dark and heavy brows, the temper, the heart on my sleeve. But if I was like my mother, why was I so numb?

"Do you think Ray did it?" I asked. The police couldn't find our stepfather or the pickup truck he and my mother owned. He was the only suspect, but I didn't want to believe it.

Josh waited a while to respond. "We'll know for sure when they find him."

"You think he'd come here?" I asked. Ray knew where we lived. He'd been to the house a few times, with our mother, staying on the pullout couch in the living room.

"The detective mentioned that. He said he doubted it, but to keep an eye out."

Late that night, I said a prayer for the first time in months. I didn't pray for my own safety; I knew better than to rely on God for that. Instead, I got up off my knees, pulled a long, grey case out of my closet, laid it on the bed and flipped the catches. Inside lay a rifle, a gift from my father on my 13th birthday, an old Lee-Enfield bolt-action. I lifted it out of the case, loaded it, chambered a round and rested it against the wall by my bed. Then I tried to sleep, but every time a car passed, I sat up to peek out the window, expecting to see Ray.

After a few sleepless hours, I got up and went to my desk. I kept a journal in which I wrote to the future self I imagined. I would write about how dislocated I felt after moving from Tombstone, a town of 1,500 people to Tuscon, a city 30 times that size, how I felt like an impostor at university, was failing half my classes. I wrote about Mum, how she'd gone crazy after I moved out, how she and Ray had sold our trailer outside Tombstone and gone touring the country with their horses, and how she'd leave rambling messages on our answering machine at 5am, saying how much she loved and missed us.

I thought I should write something about that day, so the future me never forgot how it had felt to be 20 and motherless. But I didn't know what to say. I was in my first literature class, and I'd just written a paper on Henry James's The Beast In The Jungle. So I did what any English student would: I quoted someone else.

"My mother is dead. The Beast has sprung."

My mother always had shitty taste in men. My father is my father by name and blood, but not by role: he left when I was two. Her fourth husband, Max, was the only one I would really call a stepdad, because I hated him with all my heart and he wished I didn't exist. Max was the first man I ever saw abuse her, and then bring her back again and again, until I thought she'd never leave him. When she finally did, I hoped she had wised up.

Then she dated an army man, who taught me how to drive. He'd talk about how my mother didn't love him like he loved her, and I would sometimes give advice. But I never told him the one thing I had begun to fear was true: that if he wanted her to love him, he would have to hurt her. I came home from school one day and he was gone. Later, she let it slip that he'd been married the whole time. When she introduced me to Ray, this drawling, dull-eyed cop, I figured she'd get sick of him soon enough. The first time he stayed the night, I didn't speak to her for days. When she brought him home again anyway, I started to worry.

Deborah St Germain with her fifth husband and killer, Ray PR

My mother loved to tell the story of how Ray had saved her. She met her fifth and final husband by calling the police. I heard her tell the story over and over, and it grew more dramatic every time. She was managing a Mexican restaurant, when one day a tourist, a big, angry man, started harassing her. He grabbed her arm. She pulled away, ran to the back room and called the cops. Ray showed up, wrestled the man to the ground, cuffed him, dragged him outside to his police car. Then he came inside and asked my mother her name.

"My hero," Mum would say, only half joking. "It was love at first sight." She'd look over at him all dewy-eyed, and he'd blush and give a sheepish grin. The story never made much sense to me. A customer grabs her, and none of the employees intervenes, not even Adonis, the hulking Greek waiter? If the customer was so big and so mad, how did Ray, at five nine and 150lb, bring him down so easy? And why would Mum – a single mother of two boys, a former army paratrooper, the toughest woman I've ever known – have been afraid enough to call the cops? The mother I knew would have grabbed the order spike off the counter and stabbed that son of a bitch. She didn't take any shit from men unless she was in love with them. But that was the story they stuck with.

We left to visit the trailer in two cars: Josh rode with Grandpop, and our housemate Joe rode with me in my truck, which we would need to haul anything of my mother's that we wanted to keep. I was the only one of us who knew the way.

A strip of yellow police tape held the gate shut. Mum and Ray had bought the trailer as a temporary place to live while they researched plans to build a rammed-earth house – another of their crackpot ideas – and it was where they'd lived together, with no running water and no air-conditioning, just a gas generator. Of all the homes she'd had, all the temporary places with temporary men, the worst was where she died.

Josh went first, opening the door and ducking through the entrance. I filled my lungs with fresh air and followed him. Inside, it was dim and warm. The smell wasn't as bad as I'd expected, musty and rich and a little sour. The cupboards and drawers had been emptied, their contents scattered across the countertops and floor.

To my left a narrow hall led to the bathroom. To my right was the bed. I followed the buzzing of the flies. The mattress was gone, removed by the police. Past the headboard, a shelf stretched beneath the sloping roof of the trailer. The flies had gathered on the shelf. As I walked closer, I saw a large shadow that spread across the wood. The dark patch was a rough circle a few feet in diameter. There was nothing else it could have been, but I didn't believe that it was blood, because there was too much. I touched the surface of the stain and my fingers came back caked with a brownish paste. I rubbed my fingertips together; it turned to powder and stained my skin. Where the pool was darkest, I noticed clumps of brown hair, and fragments of something I didn't want to identify.

A fly alighted on a photo album at the edge of the pool. I reached without thinking and picked it up. The caked blood around it flaked, and a piece of hair clung to the pewter cover until I brushed it away. It was my mother and Ray's wedding album. I put it back on the shelf. Nearby lay a toppled bottle of holy water, also stained with blood. I put it in my pocket.

I took the family Bible, a few trinkets I'd made or given her long ago, and all of the photo albums except the one stained with her blood.

In a few weeks we'd sell my mother's land, 40 acres of empty desert, a shed full of ugly furniture, a barn full of mouldy hay and a travel trailer where someone had been murdered, as a package deal at a bargain price.

During those months when Ray was missing, while my attention lapsed in a lecture, I'd sometimes find myself daydreaming about what he might be doing at that moment. I'd imagine that he was holed up in the mountains, hunting deer. Or I'd see him parked at the end of our street, staking out our house, the embers in his pipe painting his face red. On 9 December, a New Mexico state policeman called Detective Freeney and told him he'd found a man's decomposing body in a red Ford pickup, next to a suicide note and a driver's licence for Duane Raymont Hudson. Freeney must have called Josh, and Josh must have told me, and I must have been relieved. But I don't know for sure how I reacted, because I can't remember anything about the moment I learned that Ray was dead, and I didn't write a word about it in my journal. I must have thought that I could finally forget.

Justin St Germain with his mother Deborah, and brother, Josh PR

My mother fades a little more each day: I can't picture her face, can't remember a time when she was alive. She didn't like to think or talk about the past, a trait I inherited. Nearly a decade now since she died, and all that's left of her are a few relics and my own suspect memories.

I moved to California two years ago, and I've found a better life: a career, a woman who loves me, smart and successful friends. I eat organic, have a coffee grinder and a housemate from France, hang out at used bookstores and lesbian bars and literary readings. I should be happy. But this life feels like a lie, because it's built on one. When I moved here, I denied my mother, lied about her death, tried not to think of her. I thought I was leaving all that behind. It worked, for a while.

Then, one night, I found myself talking to a friend, Laura. She asked about my mother. I'd told her long before that she'd died in a car accident. "My stepdad shot her." For a moment, Laura didn't say anything, just stared searchingly at my face. "That's awful," she said, and left it at that. Soon afterwards, we started dating. It wasn't like I'd feared it would be; she didn't ask a lot of questions or define me by my past.

Afterwards, I wondered why, after lying about my family to everyone in California, I had blurted my secret to a woman I liked at a party. It didn't make sense, but it wasn't a surprise; lately I'd felt the walls around the past crumbling, sensed something stalking me again. For years now I've denied my mother's murder, always trying to be some different kind of man – normal, stable, calm. I've hoarded the rage in my heart, and it manifests in the destructive ways rage does: chronic chest pain, failed relationships, an exaggerated response to threats. I expect the people I care about to die at any moment, and I don't make plans for the future, because I don't believe in it; in order to do that, I'd have to understand the past.

I rented a guesthouse in Tucson for the summer and contacted Detective Freeney and my mother's ex-partners in the hope of finally finding out what really happened. One of her exes, Brian, had pulled together all the police reports and gave me copies. I found myself lying on the guesthouse floor, sweating and drunk and alone, wondering what the hell I was doing. The documents lay unread on the coffee table, full of facts and dates and names. I did a shot of tequila to steel myself, then sat on the floor and read it all.

I read that on 9 December 2001, Agent Bishop of the New Mexico state police got a call from his sergeant around noon: a ranger in Caballo had found a dead man in a truck. The vehicle was registered to Deborah St Germain and Duane Raymont Hudson, of Tombstone. As Bishop approached and circled the truck, he noted the make, model and plate, the empty water tank, mud on the tyres, the tinted windows open a couple of inches, the sunscreen blocking his view through the windshield, and the mobile phone antenna jutting above the rear window. He smelled a strong odour coming from inside the truck.

Bishop peered through the window and saw a body on its back, partially covered by a sheet. On the centre console between the front seats he saw an open spiral notebook with writing on the page. A driver's licence and a wedding band sat on top of the note.

The report also includes a copy of the suicide note. It's hard to read, spattered with black dots of various sizes, blood and brain matter. As near as I can tell, it says: "I can no longer endure the pessimistic and fatalistic demeanour of my life. Nor can I continue to live a life of falsehoods and lies. The constant negative attitude has caused so much mental strain and anguish that I have reached a point of no return.

"I have once again failed in life. I failed in my Marine Corps career, my law enforcement career, my first marriage and fatherhood, and now my second marriage. My actions have set my fate and destiny and also expedited them.

"I have ruined many lives and I am sorry."

The first time I read it, I thought: what a crock of shit. He doesn't admit what he did, doesn't use any of the words: murder, wife, mother. He doesn't even say her name. On the second read I noticed the details. The inflated diction; I guess he had been reading. The wire spine of the notebook is on the right; he began the note on the back of a page. What was on the front, the rough draft?

There are no clues left, no mystery to solve. I know what happened. I just don't know why.

She would have been facing west. It was warm that day, 90F at noon; the windows of the trailer were open, and through them she saw the mottled hills, rising and falling into the distance. Outside, the door of the truck slammed shut.

The trailer door opened. A shaft of light, a breath of wind, a boot thumping on the step. She ignored him. They had fought about something, said things that couldn't be unsaid.

He said something or he didn't. She replied or she didn't. I hope he hesitated before he raised my mother's gun and pointed it at her back, hope it was hard for him to become that man. If she sensed what was coming, she didn't turn around.

A tug at her shoulder. A crack split the room. Another. The pain arrived an instant later, in her shoulder, in her chest, spreading, ricocheting. She had known pain, but this was fresh and terrible.

She slumped against the shelf. Her world went slow. He must have said something then, but I doubt she grasped his words. She must have felt what I do, words failing. Once she'd known what love meant, had said the word in vows, and she'd used it again and again, meaning something different every time, until it brought her here, to a place without a name, with a man she didn't love any more, and now the words were done. Only acts remained. She was going to die.

His boot heels beat on the floor as he approached. She whirled and raked her nails across his face. He shoved her away. She landed face down on the shelf and knew that he was aiming. She never would have thought he'd shoot her in the back.

In that last moment she must have felt it all acutely. Pain. The sun on her back. The tang of gunpowder on her tongue. A shred of desert through the window. The last swell of hope: if she could talk him down, it was only her shoulder, she could call an ambulance, she might still live. She must have thought of her parents, her brother, her horses. God.

And her children. Where we were. How we'd hear. What we'd do without her, the men we would become. Her hopes for us, the weddings and grandkids she would miss. The bond we had. Reading to us in the womb before we knew the words. As a shadow arm rose on the wall, as she braced for the bullet, she would have tried to speak to her sons. We might not hear her now. We might not think we could. But she believed that one day we would hear her voice again, and know that she had never left us.

• This is an edited extract from Son Of A Gun, by Justin St Germain, published in paperback on 6 February by Tuskar Rock at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39, including UK mainland p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop.

• This article was edited on 20 January 2014, to rephrase the headline and standfirst at the request of the author, and again on 21 January 2014, to correct the publisher details from Atlantic Books to their imprint, Tuskar Rock.